Until the Black Death of the World
by Assimbya
Summary: Based on Catherynne Valente's Deathless, itself based on Russian fairy tale. Koschei knows grief, and passion, and the shape of his own story.


He longs for his heart, always, as all living things long for that which shall kill them. So strong is his brother's power, that Koschei still is overcome with grief at the emptiness of his chest, the still stagnation of his blood. He sits upon his throne and weeps for his own losses, so that his subjects name him a king in mourning, a Tsar of grief. But is that not what is, to be the Tsar of Life? Life is always beautiful in the anticipation of its ending - it is a cliche, the cut flower, the fallen bird, the maiden dead before her wedding day. Koschei the Deathless has cut away the ending of his story, and yet he still feels the ache of all that he has given up.

"You fool," Baba Yaga tells him, "you do magical surgery upon yourself and then sit there moping about it. You're a villain in this story, brother. And no one likes a villain who feels sorry for himself."

The magicians offer to make him a clockwork heart, which shall beat and thrum within his chest just like a real one, but it is dead inside his hand, a mockery of his power, and Koschei refuses.

He acts the villain, and so he takes a tyrant's tribute, lures away from their lives girls with eyes like starlight and hair like winter sun, and drinks in the pulse of their skin, the beat of their breath. He is ever hungry. _Mine, mine, mine._ Each of them thinks it is she who is ravenous, devouring up his food and his attention and his dominance as if she has been starving all his life, but he knows that he takes more than he gives, eating up the life in their kisses, the adrenaline which savors their sweat as he caresses, commands, adores. When each of them betrays him, Yelena and Vasilisa and Yelena again, he drinks in the pain of their cruelty, the wounds they deal, the echo of their absence. It hurts less than the injury he has done to himself.

He takes each of his women and freezes them, presses them into stillness like flowers between the pages of a book. He weeps as he does it, but they are living, they are his, and his brother shall never have them within his domain. He imagines opening up their chests and taking out their deaths, as he has taken out his own, but he cannot imagine their mouths contorting in the agony he has felt. He thinks that they, too human, too living, would go still and let Viy take them. Then, a compromise - the factory, their busy, active hands, all of them still under his control and within his kingdom, even if they never again shall lie in his bed, laugh under his touch, consent to be his bride (how could they, once they have seen him dead and alive again, once they have already named him a monster to be destroyed, once they have chosen boys redolent with mortality over all he has given to them?). Again and again the grooves of the story run, like the wheat which sprouts every year and is struck down, and Koschei steals and loves and loses and grieves.

* * *

There is Marya, then, and Marya is no different, Marya is special only as all of them are, for each of his lovers has been his true beloved, each he loves anew and without parallel. Marya makes him think of the smell of wood wet with new snow, of the living strength of a tree trunk. Marya's teeth snap at his skin and he wears the marks like armor. Marya gives her will to him, fingers uncurling so slowly that his longing for it swells and surges until at last he has her submission, his bride on her knees and beneath his hands and pledging her devotion, and it fills him up like death.

Marya, who longs to be his queen. "There shall be no secrets between us." She paints her mouth red and strides into his throne room and twines her hair around his throat. He thinks: _she shall be different_ , though he has thought that about every woman he has ever loved, but, as his sister reminds him, he is good at self-delusion. He belongs to his own myth, and he makes her his general, teaches her how to shoot straight.

He watches as she turns away from the factory and never goes back, as she never takes each Yelena and Vasilisa in her arms and demands her story and her freedom. Marya obeys her myth almost as well as he does. He dreams of each woman he has loved filling up his palace, animating a kingdom with the sheer force of desire. If ever he could engender children, then his lovers could birth an army which would crush Viy into the ground. But this is not to be. Those he loves sew soldiers for his service, drained out of passion, husks. He has only Marya, and he cannot look back. Her eyes go hard with killing. He fights harder to reach her - chains now, against the wall, knives and whips instead of rods of birch. He thinks that he cannot live with losing her, but he has thought that every time, and the truth is that he cannot die. He drinks in the sound of her begging and her gratitude. They do not understand, humans, about what life is, how there is never more of it than in these moments of passion and contest, of pain and desire, of bodies wanting and striving. He wants their marriage to last forever.

But Marya is no different. Marya turns away and leaves and he does not try to stop her. She goes back to a human life of sunshine and scarcity and compromise. He waits alone in his palace for her to return and try for his death, and he weeps.

She never returns. She never tries to kill him.

* * *

Break his rule, break his narrative (yet, is he not just falling into a new one, veering onto a different story path, without willing it?). He gives himself up. Knees to the ground on her threshold, from where he once carried her into her destiny. Let him no longer be Tsar or sorcerer or demon, only hers, only joined with her, only done with the endless cycle of possession and loss.

It is joy to be bound, to let her control his body, to be touched when she wills. Though she still has a death and he does not, it is easy to forget this when his life is made up with darkness and waiting, with the anticipation of her touch.

But it cannot last. Marya thinks she can have both, that she can skirt compromise and destiny like puddles in the road, but he sees the flood filling up. He could open his mouth and command her to release his bonds so he can take her home and away from the creeping invasion of death. He could make it so that she could not even think of defying him; it would be so easy, and he knows how much she wants it, how badly she longs for him to pretend to take the choice out of her hands, as he once did.

But he does not. He gives to her instead, opens himself to her hunger and desperation. The blood flows from his throat with such vehemence that he could think his heart returned to his breast by the sheer force of his care for her.

* * *

Yet. A chink. Here is the weak point in the narrative, here is where the groove of the myth while catch his Marya up again. A transgression, a mistake, and his bonds slipped, and his arms around her again, his power restored, and he does not let her die.

Death comes. Death waits.

The sunlight is bright. She laughs in it, drained of fear. She says, "I want a child with you."

He does not weep. He is done with self-pity. The egg cracks. His hollowness is filled. He embraces his ending.


End file.
